HANDS ON Tactics. Trends. Best Practices.StrategyFriends inhigh placesHow your start-upcan get a legup from largecorporations

Earlier this year, Kathryn Sheaffer
made her daily commute to the Palo
Alto, California, offices of Waze, a start-up that makes a social-navigation app.
From her seat at a long communal table
next to Waze CEO Noam Bardin, she
made phone calls, reviewed mockups of
the app, and participated in marathon
brainstorming sessions.

Sheaffer, however, isn’t an
employee of Waze. She is senior
associate brand manager at Stride
Gum, which is owned by Mondelez
International, the company formerly
known as Kraft Foods. She was one
of more than two dozen Mondelez
managers from brands such as Trident
and Oreo who spent a week embedded
inside select mobile-technology start-ups
as part of Mobile Futures, Mondelez’s
three-month accelerator program.

Mondelez’s goal was to impart some
entrepreneurial thinking to executives
while at the same time getting to know
promising tech companies that could
further Mondelez’s efforts to amp up its
mobile marketing campaigns.

For young companies like Waze, the
program represents a big shift in how

“We have achieved as much in
the last eight or nine months
as in the previous four years.”

early-stage start-ups interact and deal
with big corporations. No more stiff
and awkward meetings, communicating
through ad agencies, or trying to guess
what big brands might actually want
before building products for them.

Mondelez’s managers gave the start-ups involved in the program input andfeedback on their technology and prom-ised to be an early customer. “Havingdirect access, we were able to get in theirhead about what they would like to seein a perfect world,” saysBardin. “That’s been verypowerful for us.”Mondelez is among anumber of corporations—including Nike, Microsoft,Big companies see these programsas an opportunity to find new ideas

American Express, and PepsiCo—that
have created accelerators, investment
funds, and other programs aimed at
start-ups. For small companies, it’s a
chance to receive funding while building
a relationship with a potential major
client. Most of these programs are run
through an open application process,
links to which can usually be found
through the corporation’s website.

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